Culture

Author: Jamie Oliver
Publisher: Penguin
The Naked Chef: 5/5 and Jamie Does...: 3/5


 
Like most graduate students, I used to live on ramen and coffee. Or KFC and Red Bull. Pick your high-sodium, high-caffeine combo of choice. It was quick and convenient, and it freed up cash for other more important things. But then I got too old for that diet. And it was around that time that I met this girl. She was smart and funny and quirky (without being weird in a bad way), and had the cutest freckles and... never mind. She was a great cook. I’d always assumed that Kiwi cuisine consisted of fush-and-chups or some manner of pan-fried meatslab with mashed tubers on the side, but boy was I in for a culinary revelation. To cut a long story short, we started cooking together because, you know, chicks dig that kind of thing. Her family recipes required far too much intuition for me, so we turned to celebrity chefs on the Web for more unambiguous recipes. Jamie Oliver had three things going for him: the sheer number of recipes he put up for free, the user-friendliness of his website, and his use of the metric system. 
The girl’s left Dunedin now, but I still have the recipes we copied, the cast iron cookware we bought, and the Jamie Oliver cookbooks I collected during our time together. There are other cookbooks too, of course (Mollie Katzen), but this is a Jamie Oliver review. Not that you can tell so far. Right, back on track. Jamie’s written a squillion books since Something for the Weekend (which also refers to condoms, by the way), but all I’m going to do is to compare his first massively popular book, The Naked Chef, to the his latest offering, Jamie Does... 
Buy The Naked Chef. Really. First, as I said, chicks dig that kind of thing. Second, the recipes in this book are pretty easy, surprisingly cheap, and really delicious (especially if you’re coming from ramen and coffee). You’ll want to stock up on spices and herb plants before you begin, but once you’ve done that, you can prepare a pretty impressive meal for less than a trip to <insert fast food outlet>. My favourite example of this was the time I made a three-course dinner for two in less than an hour for about $10: we started with a baby spinach, fresh pea, and feta cheese salad (with an olive oil and lemon juice dressing), moved on to the tagliatelle (I used fettuccine) with baby courgettes, lemon, and basil, and finished off with some baked fruit (first grilled on a cast iron griddle pan, then baked with sugar on it). It went down a treat, and I’ve used that menu a few times since. Unlike many cookbooks I’ve seen, The Naked Chef caters to regular people who just want to eat a little better. We already make hearty soups, toss salads, roast chickens, and fry up pork chops; Jamie just shows us better, and sometimes easier, ways to do it. 
Fast-forward ten years, and we have Jamie’s interpretation of traditional cuisine from Spain, Italy, Sweden, Morocco, Greece, and France. Given its decidedly international scope, Jamie Does... is not a straightforward follow-up to The Naked Chef. So, there’s a sense in which we’re comparing apples and oranges here. But even here, Jamie claims to be presenting homely folk food (as opposed to the wanky restaurant variety; my words, not his) in the simplest possible way. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite make it. The ingredients lists have got much longer, and the ingredients have become more obscure. He seems to have developed a penchant for miniature things, like quail’s eggs, baby clams, and baby squid. So, Jamie Does... is much less practical than The Naked Chef, at least for us students, and of the recipes I could pull off, I usually preferred the analogous ones from The Naked Chef. That said, Jamie Does... contains a slew of recipes for sides and snack food, including tapas and smorgasbord dishes, which might be handy for parties. Plus, the fancier dishes seem simple enough to prepare once you find the ingredients, and sound and look simply delicious. Speaking of looks, Jamie Does... is Jamie’s most beautiful book yet. David Loftus, who’s been photographing for Jamie for ages now, has really outdone himself this time. The few über-posey (e.g., Jamie dressed up as a bullfighter) shots aside, the photographs of the food, local people, and scenery are coffee-table picture book perfect. It’s really just a delight to thumb through, though I don’t suppose you paid $75 for a bunch of photographs. 
Once more, buy The Naked Chef. It’s well worth the $45 in paperback. I’d start there over his supposedly super basic Ministry of Food. And if that doesn’t suffice, check out The Return of the Naked Chef. And if, after all that, you want to try your hand at some Swedish meatballs (or whatever), you could do much worse than Jame Does... (no pun intended).